One bright morning in summer 2019, technology investor Saul Klein gave a presentation to a crowd, including several MPs, crammed into Phoenix Court – a coworking space of which Klein is a co-founder, and headquarters of his LocalGlobe VC organisation.
The thrust of Klein’s talk was that the UK had its own Silicon Valley: King’s Cross. The north London area’s seediness had been displaced by the £3 billion King’s Cross Central redevelopment, and the arrival of the cream of global tech, science and culture. Current residents Facebook, DeepMind and Google are building sprawling new headquarters there; Expedia, Universal Music, a YouTube space for creators, Central Saint Martins art school, the British Library, the Francis Crick biomedical research institute and legions of startups have also moved in. King’s Cross, said Klein, was “a New Palo Alto”, the California home to many a tech titan.
There’s a catch. Above Palo Alto is the lesser-known East Palo Alto. In the 1990s, as the Valley’s tech-fuelled bonanza blossomed, East Palo Alto was languishing in poverty and violence – in 1992 it had the highest murder rate per capita in the US. Things have improved, but for Klein, East Palo Alto remains a cautionary tale of how prosperity, innovation and opportunities can tragically fail to trickle down from prosperous areas.
In Klein’s analogy, the London community that plays the role of East Palo Alto is Somers Town – where Phoenix Court is located. Just across the railway tracks from King’s Cross Central, and once frequented by Charles Dickens and Mary Wollstonecraft, Somers Town is the most deprived ward in the borough of Camden; according to a 2017 study, 45.9 per cent of children lived in poverty, and female life expectancy was 4.2 years lower than Camden’s average. The pizzazz and optimism that have transformed King’s Cross have barely been felt here.
“You can have physical proximity, but if you don’t have mental proximity, it doesn’t really matter,” Klein says as we walk through the ward, some days after his presentation. He thinks that the tech giants and cultural institutions in the area have a responsibility to the people of Somers Town. “Shouldn’t innovation and technology have as widespread a social impact as possible – shouldn’t they lower the barriers for opportunity?”.
According to Samata Khatoon, a Camden councillor and Somers Town resident, the cultural ferment in the area may be exciting for young people, but the impression among residents of the ward is that the people and companies who work across the tracks just “don’t care about this area, or who lives here”.
More than 80 of these organisations – including Google, the British Library and the Crick – have formed the Knowledge Quarter, a consortium whose declared aim is “advancing and disseminating knowledge”. CEO Jodie Eastwood says that engaging with the local community is one of the key missions of the group.
“Somers Town is absolutely fascinating,” she says. “These are long-term projects that will inevitably have an impact on their lives. We need to offset that by providing opportunities to engage with these organisations.”
Partly, it is about showing Somers Town residents something less forbidding than towering glass-and-steel façades. Many of the Knowledge Quarter’s members engage in some form of school outreach; the Crick Institute has re-purposed part of its building into a community centre offering health and wellbeing services – its entry door opens on one of Somers Town’s main streets. But creating opportunities will necessarily mean something more than that – it will mean jobs.
“I’m talking about careers – so meaningful employment that is career-driven, not necessarily in cleaning, security or catering,” Eastwood says. “What we’re interested in is: how can we take people from Somers Town – or kids who are growing up in Somers Town – and give them careers in the Crick, in Google, in the British Library?”
The first step on that road, she says, might be simply “to demystify” entry-level job descriptions, which sometimes use hyper-technical or jargonised language. She recounts a Crick Institute’s job listing looking for a “laboratory glass-washing technician” – that is: someone to wash and sterilise lab equipment. “It sounds technical: if you saw that in an advert, you wouldn’t necessarily think that you could do that.” Tweaking similarly hermetic ads has allowed the Crick Institute to start hiring people locally, she explains.
As for the technology giants, Eastwood says that while Google has been a supporter of the Knowledge Quarter’s outreach, Facebook has been “less so”, and has not joined the group. Google declined to answer WIRED’s questions about how many of its employees are hired locally; Facebook did not reply to a request for comment.
For their part, local government institutions – in particular Camden Council – have been pressuring the tech giants, demanding that they do more. “My thinking is: you have an obligation by being in this place,” says council leader Georgia Gould. “You might be a global company, but you’re also locally based. You’re a neighbour. And you have to be part of the community that you’re in.” Gould has been championing initiatives to foster local people’s skills in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and arts subjects. The council has earmarked £5 million for an employment and skills programme, and it has asked the organisations based in the borough to hold courses in schools or help with apprenticeship schemes.
“We’re a planning authority. So we have power, when somebody wants to come into the place, to ask that certain obligations [are met],” the council leader says. While she acknowledges that some of the technology companies based in the area have been helpful, Gould believes that they are not doing enough. “We’re still pushing some of them,” she says. “We’re saying to those companies: ‘We want you to change your recruitment practices. And we want you to think differently about how you bring people into your company.’”
Right now, most of the residents of Somers Town – and the other low-income areas bordering the gilded citadel of King’s Cross – only see the negatives of the redevelopment project: the displacement of people, the noise, the spike in drug dealing under the construction sites’ hoardings. Ideally, Gould says, tech giants such as Google or Facebook should not only work to mitigate those issues, but tackle other, more complicated ones. She recommends, for instance, that Google put its computing power to use to help monitor air quality in the area. Or that it should play an active role in minimising youth violence – which has sometimes been stoked by call-out videos uploaded on Google-owned YouTube.
“My aspiration is that by 2025, residents in Somers Town will be able to understand what this development has brought for them to improve their lives,” Gould says. “That’s why I think that these companies need to step up their efforts.”
Gian Volpicelli is WIRED's politics editor. He tweets from @Gmvolpi
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
